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September - November 2006
The South Rises
Again
Writers band together to protect the environment
BY THOMAS
RAIN CROWE
When
I returned from the West Coast to the mountains of western North
Carolina in 1979, I expected to find the relatively clean air, clean
water and undeveloped landscape that existed here in my youth.
Instead, I found myself in the midst of the beginnings of an all-out
war on the region's ecology and environment.
Today the war has manifested itself in EPA Superfund sites, severe
air quality problems, mega-developments and more. Everything I read
and hear about commercial development, zoning and land-use
legislation, toxic waste, logging and water quality is disturbing.
Air pollution is constantly in the news.
For many years, I fought the good fight with body and soul as a
frontline member of a number of cultural and environmental
organizations and movements. Seeing not nearly enough positive
change in this Katuah bioregion, I took a spring trip to Ossabaw
Island off the coast of Georgia in 1999 at the invitation of Janisse
Ray and John Lane. I wanted to link up with the group of southern
nature writers that had been meeting annually for a few years to try
and address the ecological and environmental issues in the
Southeast, as well as to invigorate one another with their writing.
The Southern Nature Writers group was seniored in the early years by
Jim Kilgo, author of Deep Enough for Ivorybills and The Blue Wall,
Franklin Burroughs, author of Billy Watson's Croker Sack, and
Georgia activist and writer Melissa Walker. The rest of us were a
younger cadre: Christopher Camuto (Another Country; Hunting From
Home), Bill Belleville (Deep Cuba), Janisse Ray (Ecology of a
Cracker Childhood), John Lane (Waist Deep in Black Water), Jan DeBlieu (Wind), Susan Cerulean (The Book of the Everglades), Ann
Fisher-Wirth (Blue Window), Dorinda Dallmeyer (Elemental South),
editor/publisher Barbara Ras and Will Harlan (editor of Blue Ridge
Outdoors).
In the years that have followed, we've continued to meet on Ossabaw
Island and have organized and participated in more than one Nature
Writers Conference here in the South. Except for Jim Kilgo, who
recently passed on, we continue to write and publish our work in
periodicals and books, and we remain active on the ground with
various environmental issues in our individual locales. While
setting an important literary precedent, we also try to be
eco-ambassadors for our respective watersheds and our region.
With conditions in the South getting worse by the year, and with
politicians failing to do anything about it, it seemed logical to me
that the nature writers needed to step up and take a position of
leadership where the welfare of the region's landscape was concerned
— to wage a war with words with regularity and with as much skillful
conviction as possible.
As a result of the focus and energy of Dorinda Dallmeyer and John
Lane, a Southern Nature Writers project Web site has been funded. The site will list nature
writers in the South, past and present, their bibliographies,
biographies and excerpts from their work. There will be interviews
and articles on time-sensitive ecological issues, and there will be
contact information for writers, environmental organizations and
various links.
The goal of the Web site and the work of the Southern Nature Writers
is to elucidate the issues and bring about public debate. We hope to
generate an expanded and engaged awareness leading to a more
progressive mode of thinking where questions of balance and
sustainability are concerned.
Visit the Southern Nature Writers Web site at
www.southernnature.org,
which will be available Sept. 15.
Thomas Rain Crowe's nature and activist writing has appeared in
many publications in and around western North Carolina, and
in nationally distributed periodicals and anthologies. He is the
author of Zoro's Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods, an
award-winning memoir on self-sufficiency and living in the wild in
the style of Thoreau's Walden.
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